How much can you love a place?

No, I don't love it here, but I love you. Do I have to love it here, the Midwest, to love you?

I choose to be here because I love you. I didn't keep going, I stopped here.

I like it fine here. It's a nice city, lots going on. Weather is ok, too cold for too long, but I can manage.

As long as I can travel to places I do love, I can live here.

I love our family, your family, our house, our home, our life together that is growing in this place.

I will probably learn to love it here. That's the way love is sometimes, a long slow growth into familiarity and easy living, after a long time of learning and allowing the rough edges to smooth out from frequent use, plowing over and over again the familiar terrain.

After lots of loss (the lessons of the past), I have loosened my grasp on Place. I'm a Southerner, so Place is supposed to be my Destiny, but that myth is over for me. That myth, grounded in some kind of nostalgia for an old aristocracy, of blood and land -- it's a powerful myth. I hold 80 acres as a security for the future, but it's a loose holding.

The 80 acres are all that's left of 160 acres of land grant to an ancestor in the Jackson era, Trail of Tears corridor, settlement of whites in North Alabama, the old Nashville territory, the old frontier. Dad sold 80 in my childhood to buy a house. Wise use, I think, but he sold the easier 80. My 80, I bought from them when my Mom was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, to secure the land against catastrophic health care, Medicaid, in case something happened to Dad, and she had to go into a nursing home. All that "what if" never came true.

So, I hold on to 80 acres, just clear-cut the scrub pines, poplars, and red cedars that grew up in fallow pasture. Next comes reforestation, intentional this time, in pines, then every ten years, a thinning, pulpwood (more paper!). Eventually, if I live long enough, another clear-cut, reforestation, and on, and on.

Only, the city limit has gradually moved out closer and closer to the property. Cousins want to buy it. With this land, they could link their surrounding inherited properties in the middle of which my 80 acres sits like the puzzle piece that got lost under the sofa at the Thanksgiving party. Only it's a very neat puzzle piece, a rectangle of perpendicular lines and right triangles.

Imagine: a Jeffersonian engineer sent down from Nashville to draw out the parcels in neat horizontal and vertical lines, quadrants, townships; then, imagine, Andrew Jackson and the Cherokee inhabitants, farmers, lined up to march West. Something about this land stirs up enough trouble to loosen my grasp. (I think of CJD and her ancestors over on the western edge of the state). Hold on loosely.

I hold on to it like an ace up my sleeve. I think it's more like a jack, or maybe a queen. It's not that great, a couple of hills, a deep hollow, no access road. Not good for much, other than hunting and growing trees, maybe grazing cattle. Someday, it will be a nice feature in a housing development. Maybe a lake would fill in almost a third of the space, and around the lake, maybe a theme: log homes, an adjacent golf course, an improved road to the Elk River for early spring trout, summer bass and sauger, canoeing, kayaking.

I used to really love those 80 acres. I rode horses through it, sat in the log house window and daydreamed about living there.

Dad counted on my love for that property, to keep it in the family. He was so hurt when I clear-cut, wouldn't speak to me for months. But, then he needed something and now we're speaking again. So, his hold was tight, then it loosened, too.

Now, I wait, invest a bit in improvements, and wait. Someday, I may need to sell it. That's a bit of reality that cuts through the veneer of Place and reminds me that dirt and rocks and trees are not Destiny, they are not magical, but they are materials to be cultivated, tended, cared for, and, if necessary, traded for something of value.

So, I embrace you, but I loosen my grasp on Place. Here is home, where we are.